Regional councillors in Waterloo, Ontario want residents to use less plastic bags to help the environment.
But council members will not go as far as communities in Manitoba and B.C. that voted to ban the convenient bags.
“I always feel education is the way to go first,” Coun. Jane Mitchell of Waterloo commnented.
It’s estimated that local residents use more than 100 million plastic shopping bags a year.
Critics state that the bags, designed for a single use, are an environmental menace. The reasons they cite include: the amount of energy used to make them, the way they clog landfills, and the litter they create in the countryside, threatening wildlife.
“They persist for a very, very long time in the environment,” University of Waterloo professor Jennifer Clapp told councillors. She urged councillors to consider banning the bags or forcing consumers to pay for them, if they have that authority.
“A lot of people do want to see a reduction in plastic packaging,” she commented.
Most local bags are thougt to end up in the landfill, where pieces of them will last for up to 1,000 years.
Plastic bags are accepted in local blue boxes, but recycling success is uneven. Until last fall, local bags were shipped to China for recycling, a practice condemned by Greenpeace.
Ontario as a province has pledged to chop the use of plastic bags in half by 2012.
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